The Best Video Player Apps For Android

The default video player app for Android is sweet, but it has a couple of drawbacks which can be very annoying at times. First, the default video player app can’t play all video formats. When you try to play .avi or .mpeg files, there is a high chance that you will see the error message – “Sorry, this video cannot be played”

Second, the default video player is not very good in handling large video files (specially movies) and often freezes while you’re watching a high quality video. You want to skip a portion of the video but when you try to use the slider, the app shuts down on itself. Then you have no other choice than to restart the app and watch the video from the beginning.

If you are looking for a better video player app for Android, which can play almost any video file on earth – and seamlessly handle high quality video rendering – here are a few alternatives worth considering:

Moboplayer

Moboplayer is my personal favorite because of its superb video rendering quality, easy to use interface and unobstructed playback of video as well as audio files. Moboplayer smoothly handles videos of any file type and hence, you don’t have to worry about decoding or converting a video from one format to another before you can watch it.

Additionally, Moboplayer has a beautifully designed media library which makes it super easy to scan specific folders and add media items to your watch list. For example, you can tell Moboplayer to only scan the “Downloads” folder and automatically add items to its media gallery. Moboplayer also supports gesture based controls, multi audio streaming but subtitle support is available only for MKV, MP4 and MOV video formats.

MX Video Player

MX video player is another free video player app which solves quite a few problems. First, this app supports multi core decoding and promises a 70% performance improvement for single core Android devices, which means this is the best video player for your Android phone if it is low on hardware and CPU memory. That also means no unnecessary battery drain or compromise in video quality!

MX video player supports a slew of subtitle formats e.g .smi, .mpl, .txt, .ssa, ass, .sub so this is ideally suited for folks who watch a lot of foreign language movies. MX video player also supports pinch zooming and gesture based controls, an example is shown below:

mVideo Player

mVideoPlayer is another brilliant video player for Android which comes with a unique feature – you can create time specific bookmarks and quickly jump to a specific scene in a movie without having to manually slide through. For example, you are watching a really long video and want to bookmark a specific scene where a song starts. Just tap in the bookmarks menu, mark the time and tap on “OK”.

The next time you want to watch the same song, open the video bookmarks folder and tap in to the same bookmark. Pretty easy!

One drawback of mVideo player is that the app supports only those formats that are supported by your phone. Nonetheless, this app is a good choice for folks who need a video library browser as this app will let you open videos with other applications. mVideoplayer also allows search via Imdb.com so this is useful when you want to view more information and user ratings of a movie you’re watching.

There are quite a good number of other free video apps on the Android market, but most of them are ad supported and don’t offer exclusive features like the ones mentioned in the article. If you want more options, try Rockplayer, Meridian or Act1 video player.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, March 22nd, 2012 at 10:55 AM and is filed under Android.
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2 Responses to “The Best Video Player Apps For Android”

Those are great apps for video play back, but I found that putting TV shows and movies on my phone took up too much space on my memory card and trading out files with my computer was kind of a pain. Instead I would recommend the DISH Remote Access app. I can stream live TV or I can play any of the files stored on my Hopper DVR. . Anyone interested in trying it out can sign up for the free DISH Test Drive. As an employee at DISH, I know they are the only provider to offer live streaming service away from home and they really want to get the word out.

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